A MOTHER from Godalming has said she has been "to hell and back" after obscene messages were posted on a Facebook page set up in tribute to her tiny daughter who died on January 7.

Friends of April Dee, who was due to bury Paige Rachel Anton on Friday, started the group in memory of the infant, who was less than two-months-old when she died.

On February 28, strangers began leaving offensive messages on the R.I.P Paige site and despite more than 1,000 people reporting the comments, it took Facebook administrators almost a fortnight to remove them.

Yet on Thursday, a number of these messages remained despite repeated requests to have them taken off. None of them can be published here.

Miss Dee, 19, alerted to the comments by friends, was so crushed by the words that she has not used the site since.

“I do not have words for how I was feeling when I read them and how I feel now,” she said.

“I just could not believe someone would do something like that, that they would write things like that about a child, my child, my dead baby.

“I have to bury my daughter. I have enough going through my head without this.”

Miss Dee, who works at the Waitrose supermarket in Bridge Street, said friends had contacted Facebook’s staff on behalf of her and her partner, Paige’s dad, Matthew Anton, 21.

Louise Roff, a member of the tribute group who lives in Farncombe and is due to give birth to her second child next week, called on website officials to make changes to ensure the situation could not happen again.

“I really do feel Facebook should be made to make a formal or written apology to April and her family because, in my mind, it is completely unacceptable,” she said.

“Due to their lack of policing the site, baby Paige’s family had to be taunted by horrific comments at such a terrible time in their lives.”

Privacy controls

Three of the people who posted obscene messages remain active on the site despite hundreds of Miss Dee’s friends calling for their accounts to be shut down.

One woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has also left abusive messages on photos of women with severe injuries uploaded to groups for victims of domestic violence.

Another, who aimed racist comments at Miss Dee on Paige’s tribute site, has left obscene posts referring to a dead baby on a similar tribute page.

A man who posted messages has left comments elsewhere on Facebook insulting the victims of the Haiti earthquake, as well as Dawn Brancheau, the trainer who died after being attacked by a killer whale in Florida.

Paige, the couple’s first child, was born on November 14. She was taken to the intensive care unit at the Evelina Children’s Hospital, London, with a chest infection aged just 10 days but was released after a fortnight.

The baby was at Miss Dee’s family’s home in Aarons Hill on January 6, during a three-day power cut caused by heavy snow, when she stopped breathing.

She was rushed to the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford but died at 12.37am the following day.

The cause of death was recorded as sudden infant death syndrome, or cot death. An inquest has been opened and adjourned.

In a statement, a spokesman said Facebook was self-regulating but administrators would remove offensive content if it was reported. She was unable to comment on claims that those responsible for the comments had been arrested.

“We have instituted certain rules in our statement of rights and responsibilities (SRR) to make sure the content and opinions our users create or share does not go completely unchecked,” she added.

“We react quickly to take down groups or posts that violate our terms.

“We strongly encourage anyone who creates a page or group on Facebook to use the privacy controls to manage the pages or groups they set up and block or ban anyone who tries to post offensive content.”